November 26, 2007 8:30 PM PST

Report: Google hosted storage coming in a few months

Google's much-rumored online storage service should be available in a few months, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal late on Monday that cites unnamed sources.

The service would allow people to store any kind of data on Google servers and access it from any computer with an Internet connection. An unspecified amount of storage would be offered for free with additional amounts available for a fee, the report said.

Google spokespeople did not return calls seeking comment on the report. A spokeswoman for the search company reached by the newspaper declined to comment on any specific plans but said "storage is an important component of making Web (applications) fit easily into consumers' and business users' lives."

The news is hardly new and certainly not surprising. Rumors of a hosted storage offering from Google, dubbed "Gdrive," have circulated for a while.

The move would raise the stakes in Google's rivalry with Microsoft, whose productivity applications rule the desktop world. Google has been releasing hosted e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets, calendar, and other programs that compete with Microsoft. While consumers are attracted to the online services of Google's, corporations have yet to sign up for security and functionality reasons.

Microsoft offers a hosted storage offering of its own, which it renamed Windows Live SkyDrive this summer and has readied Office Live Workspace, a free online tool for viewing, sharing and storing, but not editing, Office documents online.

Google executives espouse a digital world where people can access their data from anywhere in what is called "cloud computing."

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Add a Comment (Log in or register) 3 comments
Google for $1000/share
by Jesse Chan November 26, 2007 9:44 PM PST
This has been written about before and would be an alternate revenue stream for Google and might be able to put them at $1000 a share: http://fishtrain.com/2007/10/08/google-at-1000share/
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Google PR Strikes again...
by Betty Roper November 27, 2007 5:14 AM PST
Vaporware gets coverage in the WSJ, while the fact that Microsoft beat them to the punch is relegated to a brief mention.

Forget the tech race, Microsoft needs to hire Google's flacks.
Reply to this comment
Google will sooner or later enter your business and KILL your business
by Sea of Cortez November 27, 2007 9:14 AM PST
People WHATEVER business you are in , specially if it is Internet or Software related, Google will
sooner or later enter your business and KILL your business because Google:
1- Is armed with Billions of Dollars
2- Will send your listings way down in its search results compared to their own listings for the Keywords searched for related to this business

Google will do all these, that is enter business after business, and sooner or later KILL your
business because they have to Maximize sales & profits to justify their gargantuan stock
price & valuations.

So what is the answer? Thanks goodness that this is not the pre-Internet (Microsoft age)
where we could not do anything to Google/Microsoft of the world dominating market after market due
to their monopoly position in one market and as a result killing business after business.
We can do something this time, by supporting this search engine called anoox:
www.anoox.com
Because anoox is operated on a Not-profit-motivated basis, they deliver much lower cost of Advertising and they do not enter business after business. Also it is operated on an Open fashion, it is kind of like the ICANN of search engine business, you can read more about this here:
http://www.anoox.com/sep-overview.jsp
Also another thing that is really neat about anoox is that its search results are powered by the people, that is they are democratically generated.

Dont take me wrong Anoox is not perfect, but it is a much more friendly search engine alternative to business owners and search engine users.
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